Jeff Bezos shares his best advice to entrepreneurs

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in July 1995 with 10 employees and
few sales.

Within two months, Bezos and his team had customers in 45
countries and all 50 states, and sales of $20,000 a
week. In May 1997, Amazon
went public with a $500 million valuation.

Today, Amazon has a market cap
of $172 billion and sells nearly anything a customer can think of
at low prices and fast shipping speeds, in addition to hosting a
cloud computing platform worth over $3 billion, and continues to
grow.

Diamandis writes that he had a chance to speak with Bezos at the
TED 2014 Conference. He asked him what advice he would give to
aspiring exponential entrepreneurs, those looking to build a
business that can grow 10-fold annually.

Bezos told Diamandis:

It's so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is
hot. Instead, position yourself and wait for the wave to come to
you. So then you ask, Position myself where? Position yourself
with something that captures your curiosity, something that
you're missionary about.

I tell people that when we acquire companies,
I'm always trying to figure out: Is this person who leads this
company a missionary or a mercenary? The missionary is building
the product and building the service because they love the
customer, because they love the product, because they love the
service. The mercenary is building the product or service so that
they can flip the company and make money.

One of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries end up making
more money than the mercenaries anyway. And so pick something
that you are passionate about, that's my number one piece of
advice.

On that point, Diamandis tells Business Insider, "There are
people who are lucky, and who hit it out of the park on their
first shot, and that's great. But unless you're being driven by
your passion and purpose, you'll give up before you succeed. And
so fundamentally passion and purpose trumps everything."

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his
personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.